It ends with two souls who create a future together.

MAX

T he years go down easy. Tisaanah and I build a beautiful little house— bigger than a cottage, this time—in the center of a sprawling garden,

and within it, we build a life.

At first, every day is long and arduous. We are so busy that we don’t even know what to do with ourselves. Transitioning power to the senate and to Sesri is a long and terrifying process. Establishing the school takes longer than I ever would have anticipated—years, even, before we’re able to accept our first batch of students. In parallel, Tisaanah throws herself into the work of establishing the guild. It’s everything that she had wished the Orders had been, and she is brilliant at it. Our work perfectly complements each other.

We blink, and five years pass. Three classes of students fill the halls of my former family home. The west wing is the school. The east wing becomes the Aran headquarters of the guild. I spend every day in that house, teaching. It takes a couple of years, but I no longer see bloodstains when I walk down the hall.

The Alliance thrives, and while the road to becoming an established nation is long and challenging, they’re determined to succeed—even if, Tisaanah often says half-jokingly, that determination is driven solely by spite for the Threllian Lords. We spend a lot of time there those first few years, so Tisaanah can help weather the storms. It is important to her, too, to establish a strong guild presence in the Threllian continent. The guild, she emphasizes, is not an Aran organization—but a global one.

I love watching her work. I know that she has spent so much of her life feeling as if she was too much and not enough of everything. But I love that every time I look at her, I find something new, like light refracting through a thousand different shades of glass.

We blink, and another year passes. Our daughter is born. Our son comes two years later.

I’ve fought monsters and faced death and survived imprisonment, and yet, the single most terrifying moment of my life was the day I held my daughter for the first time. I had never loved so deeply nor feared so intensely. She has amber-green eyes, like the sun through the leaves. Every so often she looks at me and I remember a nightmare I had, a long time ago, and I need to count my breaths until the moment passes.

This, you see, is the thing they don’t tell you about the happy endings. And, make no mistake, our ending is very happy. But Tisaanah and I—

the past has left its marks on us. The first few years, it was like my body didn’t know how to react to peace. I walked around with my muscles perpetually tensed, as if, at any moment, something would jump from the shadows and rip my new life away from me. Surely, I had thought, this feeling is going to pass eventually.

But then one year goes by, and two, and five, and seven, and still, that lingering fear remains. Once I watched for swords and magic and Lightning Dust—now I watch for trees that are too tall and rocks that are too sharp and dinner knives left unattended. I am forever conscious of all the ways the world can take something precious away.

One day, I have an epiphany.

Tisaanah and I lie in bed with tiny limbs of sleeping children splayed out over us. It had been a long week, one particularly fraught with my anxieties. Tisaanah had barely dozed off, her lashes fluttering slightly. Our son had tucked himself in her arms and our daughter nestled into mine, snoring like a middle-aged farmer and yet still utterly charming. It’s an

almost absurdly perfect moment—the kind of life I never thought I would have.

And there, in this perfect moment, I have a grand realization: This is what it means to have something to lose.

This is what it means to have something to love. And these days, I have so much to love.

Still, sometimes I lie awake at night, images that I can’t shake painted on the darkness of the ceiling. Sometimes I’m so afraid of the what-if’s and the could-be’s and the shadows of my past that I can’t breathe.

In these moments, Tisaanah slides closer to me. Her palm presses to my chest, right over my heart. And she murmurs in my ear, “We will all still be here in the morning.”

And for some reason, just like I always have, just like I did that day when she showed up in my garden and told me the world could be better, I believe her.

I close my eyes.

TISAANAH

ONCE, many years ago, I told Max that I would build a better world.

And I have.

The years are so kind to us. Together, Max and I leave our marks on the world—a country, a school, a guild, and, finally, our children.

Our daughter is so much like Max, even though she has my eyes and my mother’s nose. Our son, even at three, is already so pensive and temperamental. He came into the world screaming, like he was already enraged by the injustice in life. I know, I wanted to tell him, the first time I held him. I know it’s bright and cold and too much, but we will protect you.

We fulfill that promise. Max and I build them a home so stable, so secure, so full of love. My children will never know what it’s like to run from their home in the middle of the night. They will never need to fight for their lives.

But one night, when our daughter is five years old, something changes. She recently learned how to braid, so I let her sit behind me and play with

my hair as I get ready for bed. And in this mundane moment, she asks a question that makes my heart stop:

Mama, she asks, why do you have these bumpy lines on your back?

Max is walking in the doorway, having just put our son to sleep, and he too stops short. We look at each other in sheer panic, as if we both suddenly realize what we will eventually need to do.

I do not need to answer this question today, of course. She is so young, and very easily distracted. Instead I kiss her cheek and say, Do you want to know a secret? Your father is very, very ticklish.

And that will set off a chaotic game, one that will end with all of us exhausted with laughter on the floor, Max loudly declaring me a traitor and our daughter snoring long before her bedtime. But later that night, Max and I curl up in each other’s arms and I know we are both thinking about that moment.

We do not have to tell our children about our pasts today, or tomorrow, or the next day.

But one day, our past and our future will collide.

For some reason, this thought is terrifying to me. We have done so much to separate our children from the worst parts of our past. And yet, at the same time, everything we do is driven by it. We have taken the hardest parts of our lives and turned them into something great. Max comes alive every day teaching in the halls of the home that once haunted his nightmares, making a place of death a place of growth and learning—what is that, if not healing?

Maybe I built the guild for the version of myself who is thirteen years old, living in a tiny room in a grand house, dreaming of freedom. The guild is my third child—my first child, in some ways, as terrible as that might sound. We establish bases in every state of the Alliance, in Besrith, in the southern isles. One day, I even want to build one in the Fey lands.

Sometimes, though, I’m overwhelmed by all the work that is still left to do. Slavery may not exist in Threll anymore, but it still exists in countless other countries. And even where there isn’t slavery, there is poverty, abuse, subjugation. With every new country I visit, I find it hiding in more places. I find more children in tiny rooms. I find more lost hearts.

I see myself in every one of those children. I look at my wonderful life and I wish I could reach through time and space to that little girl, who dreamed of a life just like this one.

But instead, I reach across mountains, I reach across deserts and seas and plains, I reach across the entire world to all those other children sitting in little rooms just like that one, and I whisper, “Look. Look at all you can have.”

Is it enough? Never.

But maybe it is something, to change a world one life at a time. It is something.

IT IS EARLY. Max and I often rise before the sun for a few precious moments of solitude before the day begins. We have memorized everything about each other over the years. I know him better than I know myself— every rhythm of his body, every minuscule expression, every small kindness or sign of irritation. Every mundane way he tells me that he loves me.

Today it is by a cup of tea on the table outside before I tell him what I want, prepared as he knows I like it. We sip our tea together in silence as we watch the dawn rise over the garden. There really is nothing like the way the sun paints over the petals—a thousand different colors, and yet they all fit so perfectly together.

“That garden is a disaster,” Max mutters. “I need to get it under control one of these days.”

But I know Max better than I know myself. And I know that he secretly loves when the garden is this way, feral and overgrown and free, left to thrive by a man who has so many other things to do with his life than clip away dead petals.

I reach out and take his hand and his fingers fit around mine like they were made for it. In this, he tells me he loves me, too.

Later, I will watch Max teach our children how to pull weeds and water roses. I’ll pause my pen over my paper to marvel at the sheer overwhelming abundance of luck that needed to happen to bring us to this moment.

I do not believe in gods anymore. But maybe there’s something like a miracle, here.

I think of my mother’s words in a dream that felt very real.

You have survived, my daughter. Now live.

This memory crosses my mind just as Max looks up and smiles when he meets my eyes, as if on reflex, like he didn’t even mean to, and I return it without thinking.

I put down my pen, and I live.

the end.